Saturday, September 19, 2015

The Carlos

New York City, 1907-1909

This comic postcard from about 1912 promotes an Italian restaurant named The Carlos to New Jerseyites by claiming it was “free from
mosquitoes.”1The confusing scene shows a New York cityscape on the left and
a railroad platform in New Jersey on the right where swarms of
mosquitoes can be seen harassing commuters standing on the platform.In reality, The Carlos was located at 25 West 24th Street, near both Madison Square Park and the Hudson Tube Station shown in the distance on the card. More interestingly, it faced the drab façade of a building across the street that hid the love nest of architect Stanford White who rented the second and third floors for his trysts, fitting the rooms with mirrored walls, a canopy bed, and a red velvet swing.2 Much
of what we know about this restaurant and its bohemian spirit comes from postcards and from the
diary of one of its most famous patrons. Postcards were then a new thing, providing an ideal way for a small restaurant featuring a foreign cuisine to advertise its fixed price menu; such places wereknown as “table d’hotes.” The postcard below shows the set menu for Sunday, August 11, 1907. Italian table d’hotes typically employed this basic format for their fixed price menus which usually included an eponymous pasta dish like the spaghetti a la Carlos offered here.

Although the above postcard was never mailed, it has a personalnote writtenin the front border. It was not until October 1, 1907 that the Universal Postal Union allowed postal cards of member nations to have written messages on the address side. After the ruling, printers placed a vertical line on the back, ushering in the so-called “Golden Age of Postcards” that lasted until about 1915. The main dining room of the Carlos is shown on the card below.

Artist John Sloan recorded several visits to the Carlos in his diary.3 As a leading member of the Ashcan School of realist painters, he depicted various aspects of daily life, including scenes in bars and restaurants. His painting titled “Renganeschi’s Saturday Night” shows a comparable eatery on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village. After working on the painting“Throbbing Fountain, Night,” Sloantook his wife Dolly to The Carlos on August 29, 1908, making its first appearance in this diary.4

“Throbbing Fountain, Night” (1908)

The couple returned to the “Carlos table d’hote” for dinner on September 16 of that year, partly to celebrate a commission he received from Scribner’s and partly because Dolly was tired, having put uptwenty-two jars of peach jam that day. The restaurant was only a five-minute walk from their apartment at 165 West 23rd Street.

Sloan also went there with friends. On January 2, 1909, after spending the afternoon drinking at a hotel bar, he and fellow painter Ernest Lawson went to the Carlos. Afterward, the two artists “toddled” over to Mouquin’s and later to an unnamed Chinese restaurant.5Meanwhile, Dolly became so worried that she phoned artist Robert Henri in the middle of the night for help. Henri, in turn, called the police station. Sloan finally got home at 3:30 A.M. Later that year, after crossing over from New Jersey on a trip from Philadelphia, Sloan again met Lawson at the “Café Carlos.”

The postcard below comes from Sunday, August 8, 1909. On the weekends, thefixed price menu was seventy cents, a nickel more than the regular price.Once again, spaghetti à la Carlos appears as the pasta dish. In addition to itsset themed dinner, anItalian d’hoteserved typical American food.

The Carlos was a gathering spot forcolleagues to meet for drinks. In addition to the customary one-dollar pint of Chianti wine, the above card promotes two cocktails. The “Affinity” was made with one-third parts of French vermouth, Italian vermouth and
Scotch whisky, finished with two dashes of bitters.6The “Devil” may have comprisedFrench vermouth with a tenth part bitters made from devil’s club root. Special cocktails then cost about fifteen cents. Nine days later on August 17, Sloan went to the Carlos to see several colleagues, including Ernest Lawson and cartoonist Rudolph Dirks, creator of “The Katzenjammer Kids.” Sloan recounted the evening in his diary:

“Later on, Arthur G. Dove came in. First I have seen of him since his return from Paris, he has been back for about three weeks. Walt Kuhn also joined the party and (Rudolph) Block who is the ‘art’ editor of the (New York) Journal comics. I had three Irish whiskeys and got careless enough to suggest…that we go to (eat) in Koster and Bials cellar—a rather shabby low resort where we had roast beef sandwiches and watched the women.7 A fat one with a lean old fish nibbling at the hook asked the piano player “Professor, can you play us the ‘Glow Worm’?”

Notes 1. My thanks to Ephemeral New York for directing me to the blog Stuff Nobody Cares About which kindly granted permission to show this postcard. 2. In 1901, Stamford White seduced a 16-year-old showgirl named Evelyn Nesbit in his apartment at 22 West 24th Street. Five years later at Madison Square Garden, White was murdered by Nesbit’s then husband, millionaire Harry Thaw, leading to a lurid court case dubbed “The Trial of the Century.” 3. John Sloan and Bruce St. John, New York Scene: 1906-1913, p. 242, 247, 277, 328, 332. The artist refers to the restaurant as Carlos, Carlos', the Cafe Carlos, and the Carlos table d'hote.4. Sloan painted the fountain in Madison Square Park in 1907 and 1908. The later version shows the multi-tiered water feature that had been removed by the time it was painted. 5. In February 1909, Sloan noted in his diary: “Felt restless so went to the Chinese restaurant and was glad I did for I saw a strikingly gotten up girl with dashing red feathers in her hat playing with the restaurant’s fat cat. It would be a good thing to paint.” Completed later that year, “Chinese Restaurant” is one of his most iconic paintings. 6. The recipe for the Affinity cocktail is shown in Hugo R. Ensslin, Recipes for Mixed Drinks, New York, 1916. My thanks to Gary Gillman for this reference. 7. “Koster and Bial’s” may refer to a saloon on 24th Street at 6th Avenue, once the annex of a 1200-seat vaudeville theater thatclosed in 1893. This venue, dubbed “The Corner,” was long associated with prostitution. 8. The building that once housed the Carlos is now home to a budget hotel named La Semana.

Welcome

Menus generally first appeared in the United States in the late 1830s. They came into being with the earliest hotels and restaurants, and at a time when service à la russe—the serving of dishes in courses rather than all at once—was growing in popularity. For the first time, diners were granted choice and anticipation.

Menus aid our cultural memory. They provide unwitting historical evidence—not only of what people were eating, but what they were doing and with whom they were doing it; who they were trying to be; and what they valued. Deciphering the story behind a particular menu often requires great sleuth-work. That’s what I'll be undertaking on this website.

My collection of menus illustrates American history and culture beginning from the mid-19th century. It contains bills of fare from a wide variety of venues, ranging from restaurants and hotels to private organizations, military units, steamships, and trains. From the start, the menu has been an art form. Some were beautifully crafted by printers or high-society stationers to celebrate special events. Others simply expressed the whimsy of everyday life.

Even when saved as personal souvenirs, menus were frequently discarded by subsequent generations for whom they had no special meaning. As with other types of ephemera, one aspect of their appeal lies within the notion of their improbable survival.

Viewing the Menus

Scroll over images for photo credits. Click on the picture to enlarge the image.

About Me

Collecting menus reflects my interest in history and culture, including the social and food customs of everyday life. I am a member of the Ephemera Society, Grolier Club, Library Company of Philadelphia, and Delaware Bibliophiles. You can contact me at Henry.B.Voigt [at] gmail.com